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TouchID: risk and reward at the touch of a button
- pedalpete 13y agoI think what the article misses out on (at least at the beginning, I didn't get through the whole thing) is that Apple only needs a 'close enough' match on your fingerprint vs. forensics needing a very close match. Apple only needs to recognize a maximum of 5 fingerprints, and each of these I suspect will be significantly different (is their a correlation between fingerprint and genetics? I don't think so). Therefore, they only have to match each fingerprint against the 'up to five' that it knows of. Even if your iPhone got stolen, a thief/cracker would be hard-pressed to get more than maybe 100 people to try to unlock it with their fingerprint. Again, the chances that one of those 100 would be close to your fingerprint is pretty slim. The accuracy probably doesn't need to be much better than Android's face unlock, as the fingerprint scanner has the benefit of having something similar to a photograph, but they don't have to deal with any lighting or angle issues (I know the fingerprint scanner isn't a camera, but face detection doesn't use the actual camera either, it maps your face to points and then compares those points.